Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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My entry for the theme this time around is not really a game. It’s a creature creator inspired by the one in Spore.

Create a creature by moving the joints in its spine and adding new ones as you go along. Add some bones, shift some shapes. Extrude some limbs and connect them to the ground and the game will estimate what can be used as legs.

The various parts are technically a lot simpler than their equivalents in Spore, but I’m really happy I managed to actually put together all these parts during the jam.

A small technical summary:

The user operate on a set of connected nodes.

The nodes have a size and metaballs are generated along the node connections, with interpolated sizes.

Then, the metaballs are used to generate a polygon surface, by writing volume data (and some node data) to a voxel field.

After that I run a marching cubes implementation over all the voxels. It’s pretty unoptimized so it’s done on its own thread (free lunch >hue hue<).

The polygonization also generates the normals by looking at the voxel neighbours and per-vertex bone weigths by looking up metaball interpolation step and bone owner information (although bone weigths are only set when going into simulation mode).

Debug visualization of the metaball- and voxel data

It’s an octopus

When the user then press the simulation button, a skeleton is generated from the nodes. The relation between nodes, bones and metaballs are kept track off so the correct bone weigths can be set per vertex (this step is the most finicky imo).

The nodes are used to calculate what constitutes as legs and then leg chains are built for all the legs. These chains are used by the very simple IK solver that animates the legs. I went with a kinda crappy law-of-cosines solution. I didn’t put a lot of effort into making it translate into 3d, so its results are best when the legs are in the sagittal plane. (Spore does way cooler stuff to solve this, I recommend reading Chris Hecker’s paper on it)

To move the creature I just look at how far the feet have moved when they were on the ground. To make movement look better on creatures with more than 2 legs I might have to implement a flexible spine or adjustable hips/shoulders.

The gait animation is also procedurally generated based on feet rows, leg length and a movement graph that can be scaled.

Decided to dust off some old code for turntable camera movement and click+drag interface and make something for the jam. Will probably become something more like an editor rather than a game. We’ll see.

So, I’m trying to make a black & white-inspired game.
Finally starting to get some graphics in there (is that a giant blue cow??) and the simplified AI seems to work. Exciting! I’ll probably submit this to the jam, so much left to do before it’s even something. 😛

Thank you so much everyone who played and commented on my game with helpful feedback!
The feedback was more or less unanimous, which made it a little easier to have a look at the flaws.

In the new build I’ve focused on making jumping easier by adding a small grace period where you’re able to jump after having walked off an edge. I’ve also made it possible to jump a little earlier before hitting the ground. You can jump higher overall as well, and the triple jump also allows you to move faster forwards than when you’re running.

More boost in the triple jump!

I made some small changes in order to address the slipperiness as well. It’s now possible to take smaller steps when starting movement from a standstill. It’s still easier to move slowly with an analog stick, but this somewhat emulates it for keyboard as well, without making the character feel to slow or unresponsive (I hope).

I’m also trying out an automatic camera solution that will slowly move to behind the character when the player is not manually rotating the camera. It won’t do this whilst the player is jumping, standing still or walking facing the camera. It’s experimental, but more akin to what is commonly seen in platformers, so tell me what you think of it!

Single jumps more useful.

I also wanted to tell you that I’ve added a Linux– and a Mac OS X build that is available for download now as well! \(o3o)/ wööö!

So I managed to finish my little 3d platformer in time for the compo! I had a lot of fun making it this weekend, it’s a little challenging with some precision jumping needed in some places, hope you enjoy!